Every Eddie Murphy Movie, Ranked
Updated January 2023 to add You People.
After a successful stand-up career in the 1970s and a wildly acclaimed run on Saturday Night Live in the early 1980s, Eddie Murphy launched his film career (while still on SNL) in 1982 and has been appearing on the big screen fairly steadily in the decades since, starring in over 40 titles. To date, Murphy's films have grossed over $6 billion worldwide, but only occasionally has the material on screen matched Murphy's comedic talents—and, even when it has, reviews have sometimes been less positive than you might expect. In the gallery above, we rank all of his films to date (including his newest, Coming 2 America) from worst to best by Metascore, which reflects the consensus of professional critics for each film.
Murphy re-teamed (somewhat acrimoniously) with his Trading Places director, John Landis, for this warm-hearted, fairy tale-esque rom-com that stars Murphy as (among other characters) the prince of a fictional African nation (Zamunda) who heads to New York to search for a bride—a journey that includes taking a low-level job at McDowell's, a fast-food restaurant that definitely isn't McDonald's. Arsenio Hall (also playing multiple characters), James Earl Jones, John Amos, Eriq La Salle, and Shari Hadley also star. Critics didn't love it upon its 1988 release, but audiences certainly did. And though a planned TV spinoff didn't come to fruition, a sequel did get made—a mere 33 years later. A generation of law students (and fans of creative Hollywood accounting) also became familiar with Coming to America after a dispute over the film's writing credits led to a landmark decision in entertainment law, Buchwald v. Paramount.
“Coming to America is the filmic equivalent of using a Maserati to go to the corner grocery store — Murphy's colossal comic gifts and Landis' countercultural sensibilities are largely wasted, never pushed to the floor in this idling, curbed comedy.” —Duane Byrge, The Hollywood Reporter
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